Explore "In an Unknown Prision Land" by George Griffith on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
No doubt it was due to the very wide difference between the two points of view from which I had seen Australia and the Australians, but I must confess that my first impressions were more pleasant than my second. Naturally the happy-go-lucky-sailor lad who thought that the earth was his and the fulness thereof as long as he had a shilling in his pocket and a square meal ahead of him, would not look upon things in general with the same eyes that I did after twenty years of changing fortunes and the gradual fading of the "golden dreams of trustful twenty,"-or eighteen, to be more exact.
In those days I was, almost of necessity, a practical democrat living in a democracy which neither had the time nor the inclination to bother about politics; but now many experiences in many lands had taught me that democracy of the political sort is more pleasant to read about than to rub shoulders with!